Emergency Code 2.5 Release

Emergency Code 2.5 release — Devlog

I went into this patch planning to knock out two or three nagging bugs. It did not stay that small. Here's everything worth knowing about, split into the new stuff and the fixes.

New added features

Telemetry Overlord. There's now a central monitoring screen — hit the 📡 button on the monitor and it pulls up every occupied bed's live waveform at once, not just whoever you're currently charting on. Each row gets its own color-coded HR/SpO2, an acuity strip on the left, and a status badge (CODE BLUE, ASYSTOLE, NOT CONNECTED, DETERIORATING) so you can tell at a glance who actually needs you. Basically the "watch the whole department" screen this game was missing.

You can call your own codes now. There's a real Call Code Blue button instead of codes only ever happening to you out of nowhere. Fair warning — call it on someone who isn't actually crashing and the team stands down and you eat a 15-point penalty. Reserve it for patients who are genuinely coding.

Codes can also happen while you're not looking. Any bed you're not currently on has a small chance per tick of coding on its own — the sicker the patient, the higher the odds. You'll get a loud, sticky red banner and a siren that won't shut up until you go take over compressions.

RN Alvarez and RT Coleman are actually doing their jobs now. Once a code starts, your code team pushes epi on its own timing and bags the patient without you having to click every single med yourself. Feels a lot more like a real code with people around you instead of a solo show.

Live 12-lead viewer. Print Strip now opens an actual animated 12-lead with real lead-specific morphology — STEMI shows elevation in II/III/aVF with reciprocal depression where it should be, TCA shows that terminal R wave in aVR, etc. Every strip you print gets saved to a scrollable history so you can flip back through what you've captured.

CareTrack got a full rebuild. The EHR went from a simple tabbed panel to something a lot closer to actual Epic — badge login, In Basket/Chart/Schedule/Orders tabs, the whole nav tree (Snapshot, Flowsheets, MAR, Orders, Demographics, Care Team), SmartPhrases, note signing, the HIPAA banner, all of it. You can edit chart fields directly and it autosaves.

Potassium is a real, moving number now. For the hyperkalemia case specifically, potassium climbs continuously if you don't treat it, and the EKG actually morphs with it — peaked T waves, then flattened P/widened QRS, then the sine wave. Calcium buys you time by stabilizing the membrane, insulin and D50 are what actually bring the number down. Ignore it long enough and it'll throw its own arrest.

A handful of meds now run on real seconds instead of sim-minutes. Adenosine (15s, with the signature flatline blip as it converts), the benzos, levophed, calcium, and insulin/D50 all have real onset delays now instead of the old flat sim-minute buckets. Adenosine and levophed both freeze the vitals for their window so nothing drifts weirdly while they're working.

Five new low-acuity walk-ins, plus a proper low-priority triage system to go with them — a chunk of Low-acuity patients now get a real 40–80 minute wait before they're "supposed" to be seen, and jumping the line on them while someone actually critical needs you costs points. A few of them are hiding a real finding if you bother to screen them anyway.

EMS patients you pick manually now get the radio call too. That used to only happen for Live Shift's auto-spawned patients — now any EMS-transported case gets the heads-up report before the bed actually populates, whether you clicked them yourself or not.

Transfer to Another Facility and Transfer by LifeFlight are now dispositions available on every case, scored as a safe middle option.

Bug fixes

The waiting room admission bug. This was the one that actually kicked off this whole pass — patients in the waiting room had no real way to get admitted because the game was checking bed slots that didn't actually exist at your current Live Shift tier. Room button showed open when there wasn't one. Fixed.

The monitor "randomly" unhooking your patient. Turned out not random at all — EMS patients arrive already on the crew's own monitor with a countdown before they leave, and that countdown was only 5 sim-minutes. One IV plus one ordered test alone burns 5 minutes, so it was disconnecting people almost immediately after you started working them up. Window's 15 minutes now, and the Hook Up Patient button pulses amber the whole time it's pending so it's not a silent countdown anymore. Also fixed the button itself not actually clearing the pending timer when you clicked it during the handoff window.

Pause wasn't actually pausing everything. The alarm sound runs on its own separate timer from the sim clock, so an alarm that was already going when you hit pause just kept blaring the entire time you were paused. Same deal with Live Shift — it only checked whether you were on the case picker, never whether you'd hit pause, so the department clock and EMS radio calls kept going in the background. Both now actually respect pause.

The central monitor's heartbeat trace looked fake. Not a style complaint — an actual sizing bug. The canvas was inheriting its default aspect ratio instead of the row's real height, which blew it up 5-6x too tall and dragged the whole row up with it. That's why the spikes looked huge and jammed together. Fixed the sizing, redid the whole row layout while I was in there (color-coded vitals, status pills, acuity bars, a lead label, a live pulse dot) so it actually reads like a real monitor now instead of a wall of noise.

Every patient used to look identical on arrival. Regardless of how sick a case was written to be, everyone showed the same generic textbook-normal vitals the second they hit the bed — sepsis's hypotension, the overdose's hypoxia, none of it showed up until you actually checked. That also meant the alarm lights and the spontaneous code-blue check could never trigger early for someone who should've already been critical walking in. Now every case's actual authored vitals show from minute one.

Danger-group med complications were getting more likely to happen every time you clicked anything. A documented "40% chance" complication was supposed to roll once — instead it was re-rolling on every subsequent med click after the threshold was hit, so the real odds crept toward basically guaranteed the longer the case dragged on. Now it only rolls once.

Case Creator was wiping your typed test results. Checking a second test box in the Case Creator was rebuilding the whole results section from scratch and silently deleting anything you'd already typed for the first one. Same bug existed in the consult response fields too. Both fixed.

Reopening a chart could corrupt a different patient's notes. The EHR module reuses the same DOM node across patients, and every reopen was stacking a fresh set of listeners on top of the old ones without clearing them first — so typing in a freshly opened chart could, in the wrong circumstances, silently write into a completely different patient's saved state. Fixed.

Respirations looked frozen even when they weren't. The RR trace was scrolling new pixels at the same rate as the heart rate line, but breathing is roughly 4x slower than a heartbeat, so a box sized to show a handful of heartbeats only ever caught a sliver of one breath. Gave it its own, much slower scroll speed.

Extreme high blood pressure wasn't tripping the critical-vitals check. Stack enough pressors or fluids and you could push systolic arbitrarily high without the game ever flagging it as critical. Added the missing upper bound.

The SpO2/RR readouts froze during codes, death, and the adenosine flatline. Those states drew their own special EKG line and bailed out early, skipping right past the code that keeps SpO2/RR animating — so those two boxes just sat there showing stale numbers for the whole event even though the heart line kept moving. Fixed (and it's the clinically correct picture too — no pulse or spontaneous breath means no real waveform there anyway).

The PVC/PAC counter could disagree with what was actually on screen. It used to roll its own separate random check instead of reading off the exact same rhythm the trace was already drawing, so the count and the beats you were actually looking at weren't guaranteed to match. Now they're pulled from the same source.

Smaller stuff

Slow-tier Live Shift now gives you 2 beds instead of 1. Oxygen devices (nasal cannula, NRB, BiPAP, all of them) apply the second you click them instead of sitting in a delay queue — no real reason a plain O2 device should have pharmacokinetics. Widened the randomization on the pulse and breathing waveforms because the old range was technically varied but too subtle to actually notice. And a small perf cleanup — canvas sizing was getting recalculated 60 times a second for no reason; now it only happens when the window actually resizes.

That's the whole pass. Bigger update than planned, but the sim's in a much better spot for it.

CHRONO AMENDMENT ADDED: THE ROAD TO BETA 1.0 🚀📢 ATTENTION ALL OPERATORS:Please log your clinical feedback immediately! Version 2.5: The Telemetry Overlord Update is officially the final decimal release branch of the Alpha development phase [PERUGI_1.1].We are officially skipping all incremental builds (v2.6, v2.7, etc.) to funnel 100% of our production energy into a massive, earth-shattering, feature-complete EMERGENCY CODE BETA 1.0 MEGA-DROP [PERUGI_1.1]! This upcoming release will completely overhaul the simulation loop, introducing the pure Empty-Bay Live Shift Mode, advanced Multi-Wing Progression Architecture, and maximum-stress disaster difficulty variables [PERUGI_0.1.2, PERUGI_1.1].THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO SHAPE THE CODELINES: If you have layout suggestions, medical compound feature requests, or UI tuning recommendations, message me directly right now or forever hold your peace!